3 ms·
A title of "Memory is getting slower, Disk is getting faster" might remove a lot of the initial confusion this post causes.
by crawshaw 1y ago
A title of "Memory is getting slower, Disk is getting faster" might remove a lot of the initial confusion this post causes.
- marcosdumay 1y agoExcept that the article doubles (or rather, triples) down on claiming that reading from the disk is faster than from the memory despite all of CS (CS, really? That has nothing to do with CS on reality) "dogma" claiming otherwise. It's a weird article. It looks at an insightful set of numbers, fairly accesses them, and then goes on to conclude the stupidest thing.
- numpad0 1y agoMaybe they discovered DMA transfer from SSD on PCIe being less bottlenecked than from DRAM, and fell into a rabbit hole from there. Switching hubs always has more bandwidths than a port that it is part of, and modern CPU resides on the PCIe equivalent of an uplink port. It makes sense that there would be situations where peripheral-to-peripheral DMAs would be faster than RAM-to-peripheral transfers to my low-paygrade brain.
- marcosdumay 1y agoYes, there exist situations where periferal-to-periferal is faster than RAM-to-periferal. But that doesn't make the disk access optimizations on your OS harmful, nor even useless. The disk-to-CPU access is best done through those optimizations for several reasons, one of them being that the author's conclusion isn't entirely supported by the data.